[aleem]

One suggestion from a use-case standpoint.

On iOS, "tomorrow at 6" is parsed as 6PM instead of 6AM. This makes sense because usually people really mean 6PM. This is context dependent--in chat logs etc this is desirable.

Semantically speaking, the Duckling library does the right thing by parsing it at 6AM, but if the goal is ultimately to parse human expressions, then the iOS approach is probably better.

EDIT:

Another issue I ran into is that it correctly parses:

"tomorrow evening at 6"

but fails with:

"see you tomorrow evening at 6"

It would be nice to pass it the entire sentence since that's how most people will intend to use it.

[infogulch]

I think the best way to handle ambiguities like this is to present the user with an unambiguous result that highlights the choice that it made, but then to also provide a list of possible ambiguities to the application itself so it knows what the most likely corrections would be.

From the Limitations section:

> ... we only display the closest upcoming time, if any, or the closest past time otherwise. It can result in surprising outcomes, like “one year after Christmas” will be actually analyzed as “one year after last Christmas”

So this could be the interaction:

> User: "one year after Christmas"

> Computer: "OK, one year after last Christmas" // putting emphasis on what could be ambiguous

> User: "no, after next Christmas" // the application expected that next vs last could be ambiguous, so this is understood correctly

[ar7hur]

Absolutely. We are working on something called "assumptions" where Duckling informs you about what assumptions it made to produce the result (like: time was ambiguous, I chose PM), and then you can change these and get a new result. Coming soon.

[blandinw]

You're spot on. The next version of Duckling will return the list of assumptions made, as well as a list of alternate results. Applications will also be able to give assumptions as input (past vs. future, etc.).

[ar7hur]

We just updated the demo. Now you can try "see you tomorrow evening at 6" and see the partial parse.

[blandinw]

cf. my answer to another comment. Even though the demo website expects the whole input to be a time expression, Duckling -- used as a library -- actually detects substrings inside a larger block of text.

EDIT regarding 6pm vs 6am, applications will have control over the assumptions made by the system. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8397113